Las Meninas (Spanish for 'The Ladies-in-waiting') is a 1656 painting in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Baroque. It has become one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting for the way its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and for the uncertain relationship it creates between the viewer and the figures depicted.

The painting is believed by F. J. Sánchez Cantón to depict a room in the Royal Alcazar of Madrid during the reign of King Philip IV of Spain, and presents several figures, most identifiable from the Spanish court, captured in a particular moment as if in a snapshot. Some of the figures look out of the canvas towards the viewer, while others interact among themselves. The five-year-old Infanta Margaret Theresa is surrounded by her entourage of maids of honour, chaperone, bodyguard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez portrays himself working at a large canvas. Velázquez looks outwards beyond the pictorial space to where a viewer of the painting would stand. In the background there is a mirror that reflects the upper bodies of the king and queen. They appear to be placed outside the picture space in a position similar to that of the viewer, although some scholars have speculated that their image is a reflection from the painting Velázquez is shown working on.

The moderator of this community appears to be inactive. Please comment on this post if you would like to moderate the community.

Cute animation of SCP-999, seemed appropriate for this community.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/13087351

SCP-999

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7026921

This sounds like something Lemmy would also really benefit from.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/4658537

Why This Award-Winning Piece of AI Art Can’t Be Copyrighted::Matthew Allen’s AI art won first prize at the Colorado State Fair. But the US government has ruled it can’t be copyrighted because it’s too much “machine” and not enough “human.”

I didn't want to make an announcement about this but since there seems to be some confusion (to say the least), I feel that I must.

You have almost certainly started seeing posts and comments from hexbear.net users in the past day or so. Long story short, when hexbear originally federated into Lemmy a few weeks ago, they left SJW off the list of instances they wanted to federate. A few days ago, hexbear users had a vote where they agreed to add SJW to their list of federated instances.

Myself and TheDude were informed of this vote by the hexbear admins while it was in progress. We agreed that if hexbear voted in the affirmative, we would be amenable to federation and seeing how it turns out. Now, here we are.

Hexbear is a Lemmy server that was created about 3 years ago as a new home for the former users of r/chapotraphouse. CTH was banned from reddit because they were openly calling for the deaths of slave owners, which reddit considered hate speech 🙄

Hexbear is composed of leftists of all shapes and sizes, and they also have a special sensitivity to the struggles of marginalized groups, including but not limited to LGBTQ folk, the disabled, and gingers.

Some things to know about hexbear: they removed downvotes from their platform. Therefore, they tend to make a lot of comments, because the only way to respond to something you disagree with is by commenting. This can give the impression of being brigaded, but that's not necessarily the case. Also, their custom emojis are displayed very large on other instances. This is a technical issue that will eventually be fixed.

Of the major instances, Lemmy.world, lemmy.ca, feddit.de, and beehaw.org have defederated hexbear.

SJW, Lemm.ee, and lemmy.ml are still federated with hexbear.

I hope we can all get along, but obviously that's not going to be the case. I recommend that users from either server make use of the block function as necessary. More importantly, don't intentionally go to communities on the other server and attempt to antagonize them because you have a differing political stance. Some political debate is well and good, but there is a time and a place, and if you're not sure, it's probably best to keep it on your own server.

We will be banning hexbears liberally if they come in here trying to start shit, and their admins will do the same regarding our users. Pun intended.

Bottom line: we will not be defederating from hexbear in the immediate future. I personally believe they are a valuable asset to this platform, and I urge you all to give them a chance to contribute positively. If you find them annoying, just block them and/or report them; they are subject to the same rules of conduct as everyone else.

Please direct any comments and concerns to this thread, or to the Agora.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/4188546

Reddit has decided to run another edition of r/place in mid July for some unimaginable reason.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/1387534

It seems to me that it would be stupid to not at least attempt to advertise for Lemmy given the perfect opportunity. Many have expressed concerns about giving reddit more traffic, but a few thousand users is less than a rounding error to reddit. However, getting a few thousand more redditors to move to Lemmy would be great for us.

Hopefully I can get a few sh.itheads to help in this noble endeavor. If not, at least I tried.

!place_join_lemmy@lemmy.world

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1462284

My favourite, to be honest

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/1022097

Don't mean to get in the middle of the Dieselpunk challenge but I figured the people here might want to take a shot at creating a banner as well. I'm going to leave that thread open for at least a week so you guys should have time.

Please post your best submissions to the Agora thread linked above

I will try to scan both threads to get all of the candidates before we vote, but the Agora thread is the official discussion, this was just cross-posted for awareness.

The two obvious themes in my mind are gears/some sort of complex machine, or computer hardware/circuits.

As an avid Lain Iwakura enjoyer, I added that screenshot because it's awesome and I think it'd be an extremely cool banner, but there are probably much cleaner designs out there that would be more welcoming to new users. I'm sure you guys will be able to come up with some in short order.

You can look on lemmyverse.net to get a quick overview of some other instance banners.

I really don’t know how the formatting and proportions are supposed to work but I will edit that in as soon as someone clarifies.

Lemmy.world looks like this

This discussion run for at least a week, and then we can take the most upvoted submissions in this thread and put them up for an official vote.